Peter Szolovits, PhD
Core Faculty
Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Peter Szolovits
Email
psz [at] mit.edu
Website
CSAIL Clinical Decision Making (medg)
Phone
(617) 253-3476
Lab Phone
(617) 253-3476
Lab Fax
(617) 258-8682
Address

CSAIL

32 Vassar Street

Cambridge, MA 02139

Room
32-254
Administrative Assistant(s)
Fern Keniston
(617) 253-5860
fernd [at] mit.edu
Peter Szolovits, PhD
Core Faculty
Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Degrees

  • PhD in Information Science, Caltech
  • BS in Physics, Caltech

Bio

Peter Szolovits is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and head of the Clinical Decision-Making Group within CSAIL. His research centers on the application of AI methods to problems of medical decision making and design of information systems for health care institutions and patients. He has worked on problems of diagnosis, therapy planning, execution and monitoring for various medical conditions, computational aspects of genetic counseling, controlled sharing of health information, and privacy and confidentiality issues in medical record systems.

Professor Szolovits’ interests in AI include knowledge representation, qualitative reasoning, and probabilistic inference. His interests in medical computing include Web-based heterogeneous medical record systems, life-long personal health information systems, and design of cryptographic schemes for health identifiers. He teaches classes in artificial intelligence, programming languages, medical computing, medical decision making, knowledge-based systems, computer systems engineering and probabilistic inference.

Prof. Szolovits has served on journal editorial boards and as program chairman and on the program committees of national conferences. He has been a founder of and consultant for several companies that apply AI to problems of commercial interest. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics and his PhD in information science, both from Caltech. Prof. Szolovits was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) of the National Academies and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. He recently served as a member of the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and also served as a member of the National Library of Medicine’s Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee.

Research

Professor Szolovits’research interests broadly include much of biomedical informatics. He has defined his research interests by the demands of health care and how they could be satisfied by computing approaches. These include creation of decision support tools, machine learning to develop predictive models for alternative interventions, clinical natural language processing to extract information from notes and reports, use of multi-modal data, and means of combining medical knowledge with models learned from data. The Clinical Decision Making Group is dedicated to exploring and furthering the application of technology and artificial intelligence to clinical situations. Because of the vital and crucial nature of medical practice, and the need for accurate and timely information to support clinical decisions, the group is also focused on the gathering, availability, security and use of medical information throughout the human “life cycle” and beyond.

Selected Awards/Societies

  • Member of the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, 2017
  • American College of Medical Informatics: Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence, 2013
  • Harvard Medical School Center for Biomedical Informatics: Innovation in Personally Controlled Health Record Infrastructure, 2006
  • Member, National Academy of Medicine, 2005
  • Fellow, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, 2005
  • NASA: Space Act Award, 1995
  • Fellow, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 1992
  • Fellow, American College of Medical Informatics, 1984

Selected Publications

Most recent publications:

Most recent talks:

  • Computational Identification of Complex Patterns and Temporal Trajectories within Sets of Clinical Laboratory Results. MIT-MGH Grand Challenge Workshop: Diagnostics. 43.12/11/2015.

  • Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Past, Present, and Future. Pediatrics 2040, Children’s Hospital of Orange County, CA. 4.1/8/2016.

  • Analyzing our Health. (Panel moderator.) MIT IDSS Launch Event. Cambridge, MA. 45.9/23/2016.

  • Interpreting Clinical Narratives: from Linguistic Understanding to Neural Network Modeling. Boston University Natural Language Symposium, Boston, MA. 46.12/13/2017.

  • Toward Automatic Coding and Normalization Strategies. Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA. 47.12/18/2017.

  • Panel moderator: Benefits of Collaboration. Achieving a Learning Health System for Diagnostic Excellence. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. 48.3/27/2018.

  • Panel moderator: Challenges, Opportunities, and Progress. AI and Digital Health in Translational Medicine and Clinical Trials. MIT. 49.3/30/2018.

  • Knowledge and Learning: How we moved toward data-driven decision support. Keynote, NorthEast Computational Health Summit. IBM Watson Health, Cambridge, MA. 50.4/27/2018.

A full list of Professor Szolovits publications can be found on his website.

Courses Taught

  • HST 956 - SP 2019 - Machine Learning For Healthcare